


Partial

by therev



Category: The Lord of the Rings RPF
Genre: Alternate Reality, M/M, cowboy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-27
Updated: 2009-12-27
Packaged: 2017-10-05 07:31:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,800
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/39257
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/therev/pseuds/therev
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Somewhere in the American West, 1860's. Takes place after A Few Days' Rest and sometime prior to Hell on the Hide.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Partial

**Author's Note:**

  * For [mrkinch](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mrkinch/gifts).



The first winter since Sean had found a scrawny pair of travelers by the creekside came sudden, and though the days were mild the nights were bitter and Sean suggested that Viggo's little bed, long abandoned for want of room and the ache in his knees, should be removed and a new one built to suit him.

"Longer sides and more rope might suffice," Viggo suggested, "to keep from building another entire."

He and Sean stood in the room, looking down at the small bed, giants next to it. "No," Sean said, "It's no trouble."

They disassembled the bed and gathered the rope into a bundle and carried it out to the barn and leaned the pieces in a back corner. Sean stood and looked at it. The headboard piece that Viggo had carried had carved into it a crude horse head with exaggerated ears and a misshapen mouth and sideways eyes, a caricature of a caricature of the animal it was meant to portray. After a few moments Sean took up the headboard and a couple of the other pieces and began to carry them back into the house. Viggo picked up the remaining and followed. This time they leaned the pieces in a corner of Sean's bedroom, a room wholly new to Viggo even after all these months and the largest in the house save the kitchen, larger even than the parlor. A four poster bed sat in the center of the room, imposing despite the large space, simple but decorative as far as the hands responsible for it's construction could manage. A matching dressing table stood against the far wall next to a window, bare but for a comb and a brass charger that held a broken bit. Around the room a mismatched wardrobe once painted a pale green and older than he and Sean together, a lady's chair, a wash table, the basin still wet, a dresser with mismatched knobs and boasting an assortment of trinkets of seemingly little value, the smallest of which a pearlesque button, the largest a small wooden wagon with no wheels. On the floor a pair of old boots, a stack of books, and a blanket chest upon which sat a tin wash tub large enough for an infant and nothing else.  
___

In the morning Sean saddled his horse before dawn and swung up and touched the gelding's sides with his bootheels and rode toward town, his breath and the horse's pluming like smoke in the halflight. He did not ask Viggo to join him and Viggo did not offer even though he was already awake, grinding coffee over the drysink. He was gone until evening and when he returned he was no more or less burdened or changed than when he left, saddlebags empty but for water and a handful of grain. Viggo was standing with his mare, stroking her while she ate. She was looking a bit paunchy.

Sean unsaddled his horse and led him to the pen, then touched his hat in Viggo's direction and disappeared into the darkness toward the house. In a few moments Viggo saw the kitchen light spill through the opened door then narrow and was cut off again. He looked at the horse rolling in the sand, it stood and shook, and walked over to Viggo, nuzzled his hand where it still smelled of grain.

"'Bout time you learned to speak, friend."

At dinner they ate in silence until Viggo put down his fork and folded his hands between his knees and said: "I had a dream about my sister last night."

Sean looked up as if he'd only just realized Viggo was sitting across from him. He swallowed and asked what had happened in Viggo's dream.

"We was at home only we was grown and she was giving me a haircut on the back porch. I didn't see her face but I saw the pattern of her dress, little purple primroses. I don't remember her ever havin' that dress, though. And I had my arm on a table, blue check tablecloth and a pair of scissors settin' there, even though she had a pair in her hand. I knew my daddy was in the house but he never came down and I never heard him call. When she was done she brushed my neck with her hands, all clammy, and I took off my shirt and shook it out but it wouldn't come clean and I just stood there shakin' it until it was a sheet and my sister was gone and of a sudden the house was standin' on a cliff face and the sheet caught the wind and I let it go but went with it anyway."

"Woke you up, I guess."

"Bucket of water couldn't of done it better."

"Where is she now, your sister?"

"She ain't."

Sean looked at his plate, said he was sorry.

"Got a nephew in Las Cruces," Viggo said. "Ain't seen him in Seven years."

"How old is he?"

"Seven years."

Sean watched the table. They had no tablecloth but he imagined one there.

"I had a wife," he said. "And a son."

Viggo shifted his feet under the table, didn't speak.

"I guess that wasn't hard to guess," Sean said, finally looking at the man across the table. "I guess there ain't much mystery in it."

"And a dog," Viggo said.

"What?"

"You had a dog. There's a little house out back."

"Yeah," Sean said.

"Could use a dog," Viggo said.

"Could."  
__

That spring they rode to a neighboring ranch where a man named Johnson had a big dun for stud and they left Viggo's mare there for a few days to be bred. The man had a foxhound bitch, teats heavy with milk, and she rubbed her shrinking belly against Viggo's leg. He looked around for pups and found them trailing not far behind, only a little unsteady and as certain of the world around them as anything that had known nothing else since birth nor even suspected that there might be something beyond what they saw and smelled and walked upon. Viggo picked up a little male with a perfect black saddle and a white muzzle and orange across his front paws.

"What'll you take for the pup?" Viggo asked.

They rode home double, Viggo's bootheels dangling at the gelding's flanks, and the pup between his thighs. The horse called for Viggo's mare until he could no longer hear her answer, and the pup watched the unfamiliar landscape roll by, voicing an occasional misgive whimper until he settled into the rhythm of the horse's walk and slept.

"I'd be pleased with a dun," Viggo said.

"Grullo, maybe."

"I'd sure be pleased with a grullo."  
___

On the first day of July they drove another couple dozen head from Ballard's, the half-grown pup darting skilfully between lanky cowlegs. They stopped at a lake and unsaddled their horses and shucked their trousers and sweat-soaked shirts and horses and dog and men entered the lake, treading, then swimming. Sean's horse put his nose in the water and blew bubbles. The mare swam straight, all duty and grace until she reached the nearest shore and pulled herself up onto the strand dripping, darkening the sand where she stood, and shook, and walked back in, water rising over her fetlocks and ate the tall grass near the shore. The men dove and surfaced and again, silent under water and above, but splashing so suddenly as they broke surface that a few of the mottled calves near the shore startled at these water demons, ran into each other, crowding the shore in alarm not far from where the pup remained in the shallows whimpering.

Almost a year later they would swim in the lake again and Viggo would say something that would make Sean smile and then he would kiss Sean, quick and thoughtlessly and wholly without restraint, and Sean would wade to shore and pull his pants on and ride out alone, naked from the waist, shirt and boots in the saddle before him and not be seen for days.

In a little more than twenty years the lake would be a flat playa, home to no life but what persons or animals crossed it in wonder, or skirted it in fear. Dust without foot or paw or hoof print, alkali dunes without memory, white even at dusk, at night.

They swam and waded until the pale skin of their backs was pink and the horses grew restless and the cows began to sink lazily to the ground and call after a wandering few.  
__

In the evening Viggo asked Sean if he could cut hair and Sean said he could if Viggo had no intention of finding a mirror. Viggo said he wouldn't think of it and brought a chair onto the porch from the kitchen and wet and combed his hair and told Sean to do his worst.

After half an hour Sean brushed the hair from Viggo's neck with a soft horse brush, said he was finished and that it wasn't so bad, more to himself than Viggo. Viggo swept the hair up and carried it over to his garden and circled what he could with the clippings.

"You'd waited a few more months could have gone around the whole thing," Sean said, watching him.

"Wasn't exactly savin' it up or anything. Don't know that I could say the same thing about that beard."

Sean scratched at his scruff. "Never been fond of shavin' is all."

Viggo shrugged. "I'm a pretty fair hand with a straight razor," he said, rasped as at his own close stubble to prove the statement.

Sean smiled. "Guess I've put myself in more dangerous hands."

When they were finished Sean rinsed his face and dried it with his shirt and Viggo nodded his approval. They brought another chair from the kitchen and sat on the porch together, drinking a bottle of whiskey acquired from the neighbor with the stud. The pup, newly named Grullo after a long time with no name at all, came slinking and stretching from around the side of the house, yawned, and lay down next to Viggo's bare feet.

"That's your dog," Sean said.

"He's not partial."

"Sure he ain't."

They sat for a while, the mountains a ragged line to the south out ahead of them beyond an otherwise endless plain, pale as bone under the rising moon.

"Here's how," Viggo said, lifted his glass already half empty. Sean gestured similarly.

After a while Sean said, "I appreciate you stayin' on."

"I appreciate you havin' me."

"It's yours as much as mine by now."

Viggo smiled. "It ain't partial is what you're sayin'?"

"No," Sean said, "I suspect it might be."


End file.
